All credit to Trump for staving off a new atrocity. But I don’t understand why an explicit warning changed Assad’s mind about a new chemical attack given that he’s been bombed for it once before. He learned the hard way that the Trump White House is willing to punch him in the face for gassing people. No warning necessary, you would think.

“They didn’t do it,” Mattis told reporters on his plane as they flew from Germany to Belgium. “It appears they took the warning seriously.”

Mattis would not confirm or discuss on-the-record statements by a Pentagon spokesman that the U.S. had observed the movement of chemical munitions at the Shayrat airfield, the same airfield from which a Syrian warplane dropped deadly sarin nerve gas on civilians April 4. Navy warships launched a cruise missile attack on the air base later that week, which destroyed several aircraft.

Nikki Haley went further, saying, “I would like to think that the president saved many innocent men, women, and children.” Again, though, why would a warning have given Assad pause after he’d already ordered preparations for a new attack, knowing how the U.S. might respond? One possibility is that he thought Trump’s strike in April was a one-off which he wouldn’t risk repeating. That was designed to make a statement about the new president’s willingness to project power abroad, Assad may have calculated. Having made that statement, and fearful of being drawn deeper into Syria’s war, the White House might look the other way at a second gas attack. And if they did, Assad would have a propaganda bonanza, having defied another American president’s threats and lived to tell the tale. Once the White House issued a formal warning this week, though, he knew he’d miscalculated: Now, if Assad dropped sarin again, Trump would have no choice but to save face publicly by hitting him again. So the regime backed off.

That’s probably what happened, but one thing gives me pause. After April’s U.S. attack, Assad denied that his forces had been the ones that used sarin. Instead, he claimed, he’d been framed — America’s rebel allies were to blame for the gassing and the White House was giving them cover by trying to pin it on the regime. If Assad is invested in that narrative, that his war crimes are actually a false-flag operation masterminded by the United States, Trump’s warning gave him a golden opportunity to “prove” it. He could have followed through on the gassing this week and then pointed to the fact that the White House knew it was coming as evidence that they, not he, were the guilty parties. He ended up deciding against that, I assume, because he feared the next U.S. reprisal for using chemical weapons would be harsher than just a pinprick strike on a Syrian airfield. Maybe it was communicated to him somehow that that next American cruise missile would be aimed at the presidential palace in Damascus.

If I had to bet, though, I’d bet that the real warning was conveyed to Russia and Iran, not to Assad, that there would be consequences if their puppet didn’t back off. For Russia, the consequences might be the end of any hope of U.S. sanctions being lifted. For Iran, given the number of Iran hawks surrounding Trump in his inner circle, the consequences might have been … graver. I bet we’ll hear more soon about what sort of pressure the White House used to make Assad think twice.

Any move premised on the idea that “Trump’s not crazy enough to do X” feels like a bad move to me.

If only we possessed precision munitions that could destroy the Syrian planes without threatening the Russian ones.

The movement of the aircraft to the air base at Bassel Al-Assad International Airport began shortly after the US’s April 6 Tomahawk cruise missile strike on Sharat air base, which destroyed some 24 Syrian warplanes in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack that the US says Syria launched from that airfield.

The move places the Syrian aircraft in close proximity to Russia’s Khmeimim Air Base — where the majority of Russian air forces helping ally Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime are based — in Latakia Governorate, Syria.

One US defense official said that the warplanes moved appeared to be most if not all of the Syrian government’s operational aircraft.

Imagine Assad’s surprise when the next U.S. airstrike targets the presidential palace, not his air force. (Nah, just kidding. Trump’s not crazy enough to do that.) Meanwhile, according to the best estimates of Israeli defense officials, Assad still has anywhere from one to three tons of chemical weapons stashed away somewhere. Where’d he get that? In all likelihood, he always had it. Remember, a Syrian general who used to head his chemical weapons program before defecting claimed last week that while the regime admitted to having 1,300 tonnes of sarin as part of its disarmament deal with the Obama White House, it actually had at least 2,000 tonnes — “at least,” he emphasized. Where’d the rest of it go? Some of it ended up in the lungs of people killed in Idlib a few weeks ago, some is likely still stashed away somewhere:

A senior military official says Israeli military intelligence estimates that Assad has “between one and three tons” of chemical weapons.

He spoke on condition of anonymity under military briefing rules. The assessment was confirmed by two other defense officials.

France’s foreign minister said today that French intelligence has evidence that the Syrian government did in fact carry out the attack in Idlib and that they’ll provide the proof in a matter of days. Will they prove that Assad himself gave the order, though? An Israeli official told Haaretz that it’s hard to believe Assad didn’t know about the strike in Idlib beforehand, which makes sense given the potential “red line” consequences to the regime in using sarin. If you have reason to believe that an operation might trigger a U.S. attack, you’d want the head of the regime to be prepared before it happens.

As for the prospect of future “red line” enforcement, today’s Quinnipiac poll — which is usually uniformly terrible for Trump — shows strong support for his Syrian airstrike and more evenly divided support for his handling of foreign policy towards Damascus. On the strike itself, the public splits 61/31; on Syria policy, it’s 49/45. Still, 62 percent say the airstrike won’t stop Assad from using chemical weapons again and a plurality of 49 percent says it’s not in America’s national interest to get involved in Syria. How do you square that with support for the airstrike? On moral terms, apparently: 52 percent say that the U.S. has a moral responsibility to get involved in Syria. Assad deserved to get slapped for humanitarian reasons, not for reasons of strong U.S. national interest. It’s not surprising that Americans feel that way, it is surprising that Donald “America First” Trump evidently agreed.

In lieu of an exit question, enjoy John Kerry assuring the world three years ago that “100 percent” of Syria’s declared chemical weapons had been removed. The undeclared ones, on the other hand…

]]>Fareed Zakaria: Two Obama officials told me he would have ordered a Syria strike just like the one Trump orderedhttps://hotair.com/archives/2017/04/17/fareed-zakaria-two-obama-officials-told-ordered-syria-strike-just-like-one-trump-ordered/
Mon, 17 Apr 2017 15:21:19 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3952279Heh.

“White House speech writers must have written the lines that Barack Obama spoke… announcing the U.N. deal in which the Syrian regime agreed to give up its chemical weapons stockpile… In other words, the Trump administration watched a violation of Obama’s 2013 deal, and enforced it in precisely the manner that Obama had implied, which is why virtually every major Obama foreign policy official, from Hillary Clinton to Thomas Donilon to Leon Panetta to David Petraeus, has supported thhe Trump administration’s action.”

“Two senior Obama officials I spoke with told me that were Barack Obama still president, he would have likely ordered a strike that was similar if not identical in scope. Presumably, those former speechwriters would then have used different words to describe the same strikes,” Zakaria quipped.

Interesting hypothetical. Obama rattled his saber after a much bigger chemical attack in 2013, eased off when he realized the public was broadly against airstrikes, then accepted an eleventh-hour disarmament deal from Putin that let him wriggle out of his “red line” predicament. How would O have reacted to horrible proof in Idlib two weeks ago that that deal was a sham? At some point, in theory, even Obama would have had to slap Assad in order to preserve whatever shreds remained of American credibility on WMD deterrence. But after he backed down in 2013, at a moment when intervention in Syria didn’t pose any risk of conflict with Russia and had a greater chance of affecting the course of the war, what compelling reason is there to believe he would have acted militarily now? Zakaria’s Obama sources may be doing little more than wishcasting, irked that their guy was so passive on Syria for so many years and eager to claim with 20/20 hindsight that he would have been just as aggressive as Trump under the circumstances.

Another interesting hypothetical. How would the right have reacted to Obama, or President Hillary, ordering precisely the same strike that Trump did? Many, I think, would have been consistent, reacting the same way they did to Trump’s attack — hardcore interventionists in the McCain/Graham mold would have cheered, alt-righters would have booed. But the vast, mushy middle of the GOP probably would have been led by their partisan instincts, smacking Obama either for intervening in the first place or, more likely, for ordering a strike that amounted to little more than a wrist slap:

Let’s start with the the scale of the air raid itself. In the annals of pinprick strikes, Trump’s Tomahawk attack now stands as the pinprickiest…

[C]ould a strike that limited really have any such an effect? This attack possibly even eroded the chemical weapons taboo by convincing any would-be transgressors that the worst they could expect would be the loss of a small number of inessential aircraft after an advance warning—in other words, a slap on the wrist. The clearest signal of all would have required a serious punitive attack on the regime itself, a step whose legality would be open to question and that would risk a dangerous escalation with Russia…

The fact that Trump chose the least aggressive option available suggests that the principal audience for the strikes was not in Damascus or Moscow, but in the United States. In this reading, the missile strike was an ideal means for the commander in chief to avoid the opprobrium that his predecessor experienced for opting not to strike in 2013 after Assad’s first chemical weapons attack and instead work with Russia to remove Syrian chemical weapons stocks. Given Trump’s compulsive need for adulation and his desire to criticize former President Barack Obama and contrast himself with the 44th president, the strike may have been a foregone conclusion, whatever Trump had said earlier about staying out of Syria.

It’s not hard to imagine a variation of that analysis being applied to a hypothetical Obama strike. Attacking one airfield, and failing to even knock out of commission, would have been flagged as proof of Obama’s wimpiness and essential disinterest in the Syria war, doing the bare minimum in “red line” enforcement in order to save face. There were, it seems, sound tactical reasons for not bombing the runways themselves (since the craters could easily be filled in within a day or two, it would have been a waste of munitions), but conservatives would have laughed at O for that for days, treating it as a metaphor for his sustained inability to do what’s needed to actually halt Assad’s atrocities. Still, there’s a key difference between Obama ordering this airstrike and Trump ordering it. Obama had already proved over the course of his second term that he was willing to do only so much to punish Assad; even if he had greenlit the same strike Trump did, Assad would have known that O’s long reluctance to get more deeply involved in Syria meant that he was unlikely to face further reprisals. There’s no similar assurance with Trump, who greenlit this strike within the first hundred days of his presidency, suggesting that there may indeed be more to come if the regime uses chemical weapons again. The whole point was to send the message that there’s a new sheriff in town, which makes the comments by those Obama officials to Zakaria even more ironic. Obama had long ago sent his own “message” to Assad through his passivity. One airstrike wouldn’t have undone that.

By the way, the inspiration for this segment is Zakaria feeling annoyed that doves on the left criticized him last week for praising Trump’s intervention. I’ve criticized Trump endlessly, he complains. Why can’t I praise him when he does well? That’s a fair grievance, but I don’t think the left’s problem with him was that he praised Trump. It was how he praised him, saying a day after the Syria attack that “Trump became president of the United States last night.” To a dove, it’s perverse to suggest that one of the most presidential things one can do is fire off a few tomahawks. And to a liberal dove who hates Trump and will never view him as illegitimate, it’s a mortal sin to suggest that anything he might do in office, especially in the arena of war, is legitimizing.

]]>Assad on Trump’s airstrike: The U.S. may have a new president but the “deep state” is the samehttps://hotair.com/archives/2017/04/13/assad-trumps-airstrike-u-s-may-new-president-deep-state/
Thu, 13 Apr 2017 22:41:35 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3952025"We don’t have an arsenal, we’re not going to use it."

A darkly amusing moment from today’s interview with AFP. Assad has always spun his war on Syria’s Sunnis as a battle against “terrorists,” knowing that that’s an ideal way to soften up international opinion of his regime, especially in the west. And there’s truth to it, of course: As always happens in Middle Eastern sectarian clusterfarks, jihadis like ISIS and the Nusra Front emerge as “protectors” of the local Sunnis. You’ll find him referring to his enemies as “terrorists” throughout here.

Mentioning the “deep state” when he’s asked about Trump (at 6:40 below) is a minor surprise, though, tailor-made for American audiences.

Question 6: So, can we say that the US strike changed your opinion on Trump?

President Assad: Anyway, I was very cautious in saying any opinion regarding him before he became President and after. I always say let’s see what he’s going to do, we wouldn’t comment on statements. So, actually, this is the first proof that it’s not about the President in the United State; it’s about the regime and the deep state or the deep regime in the United States is still the same, it doesn’t change. The President is only one of the performers on their theatre, if he wants to be a leader, he cannot, because as some say he wanted to be a leader, Trump wanted to be a leader, but every President there, if he wants to be a real leader, later he’s going to eat his words, swallow his pride if he has pride at all, and make a 180 degree U-turn, otherwise he would pay the price politically.

Question 7: But do you think that there will be another attack?

President Assad: As long as the United States is being governed by this complex of military industrial complex, the financial companies, banks, and what you call deep regime, and works for the vested interest of those groups, of course. It could happen anytime, anywhere, not only in Syria.

“Deep state” is of course a term in vogue among Trump’s base after a stream of leaks from U.S. intelligence sources in February and March undermined the new White House. Newt Gingrich claimed he’d discussed the “deep state” with Steve Bannon; Hannity took to using the term on his show. Russian media likes it too. You can understand why. “Intelligence community” is an anodyne phrase that raises no alarm; every country needs and has an intelligence community. A “deep state,” though, is subversive, something a proper democracy isn’t supposed to have. An “intelligence community” serves the people. A “deep state” usurps them, dictating events below the radar. They’re a hallmark of authoritarian third-world regimes.

Assad is obviously using the term advisedly here, hoping to play off suspicions on the populist right that Trump has been coopted by the foreign policy establishment and manipulated into attacking Syria by the same sinister intel operatives who had been leaking against him. And that jibes with his other dubious claim, that the Idlib chemical attack was a false flag perpetrated by “the terrorists” themselves. He’s essentially calling Trump a stooge of the same forces that have been trying to undermine him all along — the word salad above about the military-industrial complex and the banks is a nice flourish — hoping to widen the already widening rift between Trump and his base over the Syria strike. It’s pretty clever. I wonder if he came up with it himself or if Russia nudged this talking point at him. They surely have a better sense of American public opinion, especially on the populist right, than Assad does.

You’ll also find him wondering here if the many dead children in the videos shot after the Idlib attack are actually dead or just faking. The crux of his “false flag” claim is that he had neither the means nor motive to use gas, but that’s not true — and in fact, his interviewer gives a hint to the contrary when he asks towards the end about Syrian forces having pushed most of the rebels into Idlib. Assad has them together (mostly) in one place, but he lacks the foot soldiers at this point to pulverize them on the ground. Solution: Terrorize them from the air with a sarin attack and hopefully weaken the local population’s support for the rebellion. As Trump’s own White House put it the other day, “At that point the regime, we believe, determined that with its manpower spread quite thin… chemical weapons were necessary to make up for the manpower deficiency.”

]]>Eric Trump: I think Ivanka helped convince dad to bomb Syriahttps://hotair.com/archives/2017/04/11/eric-trump-i-think-ivanka-helped-convince-dad-to-bomb-syria/
Tue, 11 Apr 2017 20:41:24 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3951648“Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence. I’m sure she said: 'Listen, this is horrible stuff.'”

“Ivanka is a mother of three kids and she has influence. I’m sure she said: ‘Listen, this is horrible stuff,’” Eric Trump told the Telegraph.

“My father will act in times like that. And by the way, he was anti doing anything with Syria two years ago. Then a leader gasses their own people, women and children. At some point America is the global leader and the world’s superpower has to come forward and act and they did with a lot of support of our allies and I think that’s a great thing.”…

“There isn’t a single decent person in the world who saw those images and saw those kids being sprayed down by hoses to keep their skin from burning, who wasn’t deeply affected by what happened over there.

“Then a leader gasses their own people”? Does Eric not realize even now that the original case for bombing Syria in 2013, which his father opposed vehemently, was also a case of a Assad gassing his “own people, women and children”? If your stomach can handle it, here’s a clip — one of many online — of a young child struggling to breathe in the aftermath of the Ghouta attack in August 2013. Increasingly it seems like the Trump family is under the impression that Obama wanted to hit Assad four years ago for no particular reason whatsoever. “History didn’t begin on January 20th”: That’s a lesson the right usually has to remind the left of when they get selective amnesia about Obama’s expansion of executive power, but maybe the Trumps would benefit from it too.

Also, can we dispense now with the fiction that attacking the airfield was a matter of defending U.S. national security interests consistent with Trump’s “America First” philosophy rather than an obvious humanitarian gesture? If Eric cared about squaring this airstrike with Trump’s foreign policy as a candidate, “Ivanka’s a mom and the gassing upset her” is the last reason he’d reach for to try to sell it. Instead he’d say something about how WMDs are too dangerous to tolerate their use anywhere in the world; the taboo must be absolute and enforced with military power or else the U.S. will eventually be targeted too. That’s weak reasoning, essentially a “world policeman” ethos in “America First” clothing, but at least it would attempt to reconcile candidate Trump with President Trump. Instead Eric’s giving you “world policeman” logic here pretty much unvarnished — America’s the “world’s superpower,” it has to “come forward,” and so on. If we don’t act, who will?

Serious question: If the decisive factor in whether we hit Assad is him doing “horrible stuff” and us being “deeply affected” by the imagery, why shouldn’t Trump adopt Sean Spicer’s impromptu “red line” policy targeting barrel bombs, not just WMDs? Spicer had to walk that back last night after people realized that, er, bombing Assad every time he used a barrel bomb could mean thousands of attacks per year, but the Senate’s superhawks think it’s a fine idea. Here’s Lindsey Graham on CNN this morning making the humanitarian argument (at 5:40 of the clip). If Assad murdering children enrages you, he notes, why would you distinguish between murder by gas attack and murder by barrel bomb? Take out his air power. That’s a major, major escalation, one that Russia and Iran won’t stand by passively and accept, but it’s consistent with a humanitarian logic to intervening in Syria. Does Ivanka agree?

]]>McCain: I think the White House backing off of regime change in Syria is partly responsible for that gas attackhttps://hotair.com/archives/2017/04/10/mccain-i-think-the-white-house-backing-off-of-regime-change-in-syria-is-partly-responsible-for-that-gas-attack/
Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:41:50 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3951516Provocations.

The key bit comes at 4:30, a few minutes after he talks about working to remove Assad and ISIS at the same time. Old and busted: Two-front wars. The new hotness: Two-front wars within the same country.

Marco Rubio made this same lame point about the same Rex Tillerson comment that McCain is thinking of and got called out on it by Tillerson himself this weekend, as Ed mentioned earlier. Tillerson said on March 30th that it was for the Syrian people to decide whether Assad remains in charge (and doubled down on that position yesterday), a notable break from Obama’s “Assad must go” policy. The Senate’s superhawks were aghast; regime change must be the goal. When the gas attack in Idlib followed Tillerson’s comments on April 4th, Rubio floated a little cause and effect: It was because Tillerson had showed provocative weakness by suggesting Assad might remain in power, he insinuated, that the regime felt emboldened to use sarin in Idlib. To which Tillerson rightly replied, how do you explain Assad’s previous gas attacks then?

Now here’s McCain echoing Rubio’s point, essentially blaming the Trump White House for a Baathist lunatic’s use of WMD because Tillerson wouldn’t say categorically that Assad must go. There are better theories than “provocative weakness” to explain why Assad chose gas in Idlib, but you don’t need to parse battlefield strategy to see the flaw in the argument. If President McCain had said “Assad must go” and a gas attack followed not long thereafter, why wouldn’t doves be just as entitled to blame McCain for needlessly provoking the monster in Damascus into a show of chemical defiance as hawks are in blaming Tillerson for showing weakness? You could just as easily argue that dangling the possibility at Assad that he might remain in power as part of a peace deal would make him less likely to use WMD as it would to make him more likely. If he thinks he’s fighting for survival, he might go all out with every weapon in his arsenal. If he thinks there’s a chance he might hang on and rule over an Alawite rump state after Syria is partitioned, he might be inclined to tone things down to improve relations with western peace brokers. I emphasize “might” because there’s no telling what incentives would be most effective with him, really. He was a monster to begin with and now he’s a monster hardened by six years of war. It’s anyone’s guess what combination of carrots and sticks might get him to ease off on WMD attacks. If doves aren’t warning McCain that his tough talk is antagonizing Assad into behaving more aggressively, though, why should McCain be demagoging Tillerson about not talking tough enough? I don’t get it.

Exit question: If Assad uses chemical weapons after Trump’s airstrike, will McCain concede that belligerence isn’t as effective a deterrent as he thought?

“Great move.” “Brilliant.” “Finally!” were some of the comments I heard from veteran foreign policy hands in both parties Friday morning…

“Our administration never would have gotten this done in 48 hours,” one former senior official of the Obama administration told me. “It’s a complete indictment of Obama.”

“I feel like finally we have done the right thing,” Anne-Marie Slaughter, who served as Obama’s first-term chief of policy planning at the State Department and long publicly urged a more forceful response to Assad’s horrific attacks on civilians during the six years of war that have wracked Syria, told me. “The years of hypocrisy just hurt us all. It undermined the U.S., it undermined the world order.”

It’s a two-fer. Not only do the Obama alums get to vent their support for humanitarian intervention and resulting frustrations with O, they can use the occasion to try to steer Trump to a more confrontational posture towards Russia over Syria. The more he butts heads with Putin, the more Strange New Respect will be in the offing.

But maybe there’s more to it than that. Maybe … there’s a troubled conscience at work? Not just for letting Assad act with impunity for years, but for the administration lying outright to Americans to make them believe he was more compliant on ridding himself of chemical weapons than he really was:

Putting the best face on it, former Obama advisers said it was better to have removed 1,300 tons of chemical weapons from Syria even if Mr. Assad cheated and kept some, or later developed more. “Imagine what Syria would look like without that deal,” said Antony J. Blinken, a former deputy secretary of state. “It would be awash in chemical weapons, which would fall into the hands of ISIS, Al Nusra or other groups.”

Still, the administration knew all along that it had probably not gotten all of the chemical weapons, and tried to get Russia to help press Syria, without success. “We always knew we had not gotten everything, that the Syrians had not been fully forthcoming in their declaration,” Mr. Blinken said.

“We struck a deal where we got 100 percent of the chemical weapons out,” John Kerry proudly proclaimed on “Meet the Press” in 2014. The Syrian “disarmament” was to some extent a sham, designed overtly to protect Assad from American reprisals, and many Obama advisors surely knew it. Imagine the guilt they felt last week when news of the slaughter in Idlib broke. And ask yourself: If they were willing to look the other way at Assad cheating at chemical WMD in the name of avoiding conflict, what were they willing to do vis-a-vis Iran and its nuclear weapon?

In lieu of an exit question, read this inadvertently funny column by Josh Rogin from over the weekend about how much bigger Obama’s planned strikes on Assad in 2013 — the ones he never actually ordered, see — were than the one Trump ordered last week. Obama wanted to hit six Syrian installations, not one, although even Rogin’s Obama-era source admits Trump has a problem that O didn’t have in needing to avoid Russian casualties stationed at those bases, a nonfactor four years ago. Leaking old, never-used battle plans may be another sign of Democratic guilty consciences at work. “We could have put a real hurt on Assad!” they cry. “It was the guy at the top who wimped out.” It’ll be interesting to see if those old plans get recycled by Trump the next time Assad uses nerve gas on someone. Because there almost certainly will be a next time.

]]>“Those steps are underway”: Tillerson says U.S will organize international coalition to oust Assadhttps://hotair.com/archives/2017/04/06/those-steps-are-underway-tillerson-says-u-s-will-organize-international-coalition-to-oust-assad/
Thu, 06 Apr 2017 20:01:09 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3951032"With the acts that he has taken, it would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people."

A reversal to the reversal. A week ago, Tillerson tossed out Obama’s “Assad must go” policy and declared that Assad’s long-term status will be decided by the Syrian people.

Today, three days after the chemical attack in Idlib: Nope, it’ll be decided by an international coalition, with the U.S. participating. “With the acts that he has taken,” says Tillerson here, “it would seem that there would be no role for him to govern the Syrian people.” But Ass took no actions this week that he hasn’t taken before. The only difference is that he defied the Trump administration’s “red line” this time instead of Obama’s.

Watch the clip and you’ll see that, by “international coalition,” he doesn’t mean a military effort a la Gulf War I. (I think.) He’s giving you the Obama blueprint here — first defeat ISIS, then huddle with the relevant regional players on a mutually agreeable political solution to replace Assad with some new government. He and Trump will run into the same problem there as Obama did, though, namely, that Russia and Iran don’t want Assad replaced. They haven’t spent blood and treasure in Syria to see their client booted for some unstable Sunni/Alawite coalition regime that’ll last three months before descending into a new civil war. In fact, I wonder if Trump capitulating to Russia on sanctions would even be enough to get Moscow to give up Assad.

“I think what Assad did is terrible. I think what happened in Syria is one of the truly egregious crimes. It shouldn’t have happened. It shouldn’t be allowed to happen,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. “I think what happened in Syria is a disgrace to humanity. He’s there, and I guess he’s running things, so something should happen.”

Exit question: Is Trump prepared to defy Russian missile-defense systems in Syria to attack Assad, whether via manned aircraft or cruise missile? If Putin shoots down an American air asset, what’s the play then? Bad things tend to happen when two presidents who present themselves as strongmen end up in a wiener-measuring contest.

Update: Good catch here:

Just watched Tillerson's fuller Syria answer (was offline when he spoke): Look at sequence of events and "through a political process." pic.twitter.com/96GdSeFWQM

President Donald Trump has told some members of Congress that he is considering military action in Syria in retaliation for this week’s chemical attack, and recognizes the seriousness of the situation, a source familiar with the calls tells CNN.

The source said the President had not firmly decided to go ahead with it but said he was discussing possible actions with Defense Secretary James Mattis.

Trump is relying on the judgment of Mattis, according to the source.

Trump can kinda sorta plausibly reverse himself on the need to strike Assad, but how does he reverse himself on the need to ask Congress for permission? And if he does ask, does he have 60 votes in the Senate for an AUMF to attack Syria? He might get some Democratic support on punishing Assad for using WMDs but he’s sure to lose Paul’s vote on the Republican side and possibly a few others. McConnell and his caucus will be under heavy pressure not to let a Republican president be humiliated by having his own party thwart him on military force, and Democrats will be under equally heavy pressure to deny McConnell votes and make that humiliation happen. Who wins?

The detail about Trump relying on Mattis, by the way, dovetails with his approach to counterterrorism raids and drone strikes. From the beginning the White House has hoped to outsource more operational decisions to the military in targeting jihadis, whether on the ground or from the air. The tactical virtue of that is that it lets the military move more quickly when an opportunity presents itself, without having to go up a long bureaucratic chain for approval. The political virtue is that Trump, as a natsec newbie, gets to point to Mattis’s expertise if/when he’s criticized for a decision that ends up going badly. (The political pitfall is that, with the military operating more autonomously, more life and death decisions that Trump will have to answer for will end up out of his hands.) I wonder, in fact, if that’s part of the reason why Trump took such a shine to generals like Mattis and John Kelly in the transition process and later to H.R. McMaster in choosing a new NSA. It’d be very easy for his political enemies to accuse him of incompetence and amateurishness for poor natsec choices if he was surrounded by a coterie of political appointees. Surrounded by respected generals, it’s harder. Imagine Mattis’s predicament now, though, essentially forced to make the call as to whether the U.S. should punish Assad for using WMD and knowing that, if things spiral from there, he’ll be blamed for having set the policy.

A few questions from Sean Davis for Trump, Mattis, and the Pentagon as they weigh what to do:

1) What national security interest, rather than pure humanitarian interest, is served by the use of American military power to depose Assad’s regime?…

6) What costs, in terms of lives (both military and civilian), dollars, and forgone options elsewhere as a result of resource deployment in Syria, will be required to achieve political victory?…

9) What is the risk of wider conflict with Russia, given that nation’s presence and stake in Syria, if the United States chooses to invade and depose Assad, a key Russian ally in the Middle East?…

11) Given that Assad has already demonstrated a willingness to use chemical weapons, how should the United States respond if the Assad regime deploys chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons against the United States?

Good arguments all for following the Trump 2013 approach instead of the Trump 2017 model. One quibble, though: A quirk of this WMD/red line kabuki is that it doesn’t actually involve deposing Assad, as weird as that may seem. Normally when you target a foreign leader with military power, the endgame is removing him. The Obama White House, however, swore in 2013 when they were considering airstrikes that their bombing campaign would be “unbelievably small”; Trump’s likewise would almost certainly be designed to punish Assad without punishing him so much that he topples over and suddenly the world has to manage a nightmarish power vacuum in Damascus. The point of a bombing campaign would be to enforce the taboo against using WMD without somehow inadvertently triggering the sort of secondary effects Davis imagines. For instance, John McCain and Lindsey Graham naturally want much more than “unbelievably small” strikes, calling for an international coalition to ground Assad’s air force in order to prevent future chemical attacks from the air. Would Russia stand by and let that happen. The question for Trump and Mattis, if they do take military action, is whether can they avoid retaliation from Assad — or Putin — that might force the U.S. to escalate further. And if they can’t, what’s left of Trump’s “red line” tough talk yesterday?

]]>Nikki Haley: If the UN doesn’t act against Assad for this chemical attack, we mighthttps://hotair.com/archives/2017/04/05/nikki-haley-if-the-un-doesnt-act-against-assad-for-this-chemical-attack-we-might/
Wed, 05 Apr 2017 21:21:29 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=3950772"How many more children have to die before Russia cares?"

Samantha Power spent her academic career arguing that the world has a responsibility to protect innocents from genocide, got appointed Obama’s ambassador to the UN because of it, then sat around doing nothing about Syria for four years because her boss couldn’t figure out a solution. Is that Haley’s fate too? Trump sure sounded like he cared in the Rose Garden this afternoon, but which Trump is the real one — today’s version or the one in 2013 who was screaming from the rooftops that the U.S. shouldn’t get involved in Syria?

Two points of note in Haley’s address below. One: Although Trump talked tough about Assad “crossing lines” in his presser, he said nothing about Russia’s role in propping him up. Haley observes no such niceties. She goes right at Putin here, saying at one point, “How many more children have to die before Russia cares?” Not for the first time, she appears to be running a conventional hawkish Republican foreign policy while Trump does his best to preserve some small chance of detente with Moscow. Two: She’s plain as she can be in the final minute of her speech that U.S. military action is on the table, warning the UN that if it can’t get its act together to do something about WMD attacks — and it can’t, thanks to Russia’s Security Council veto — then individual nations reserve the right to act unilaterally. Is Trump onboard with that? Is her nominal boss, Rex Tillerson? This is another bold pronouncement in the “red line” mold that places American credibility on the line. If Trump decides that bombing Assad would simply be too complicated with Russia on the other side and Kurdish forces preparing for an offensive against Raqqa, who’ll take Haley seriously anymore?

And by the way, when did Haley suddenly decide that getting tough with Assad was an urgent priority for the U.S.? Just six days ago, echoing Tillerson, she said this:

“You pick and choose your battles and when we’re looking at this, it’s about changing up priorities and our priority is no longer to sit there and focus on getting Assad out,” U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley told a small group of reporters.

“Do we think he’s a hindrance? Yes. Are we going to sit there and focus on getting him out? No,” she said. “What we are going to focus on is putting the pressure in there so that we can start to make a change in Syria.”

In Ankara on Thursday, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said Assad’s longer-term status “will be decided by the Syrian people.”

If Monday’s gas attack in Idlib had been the first time Assad used chemical weapons, you could call it a game-changer worthy of an instant reversal in America’s posture towards him. But of course it wasn’t; it’s not even close to being the most deadly WMD attack he’s responsible for. Haley’s backed herself into a corner here where, in theory, she’s for hitting Assad to punish him for the atrocity in Idlib but not for hitting him so hard that he’d topple over and then the U.S. would have to help manage the ensuing power vacuum. Which, actually, makes her approach similar to Obama’s in late summer 2013. (An “unbelievably small” strike, John Kerry promised at the time.)

By the way, Marco Rubio suggested in an interview this morning that Assad attacking Idlib with nerve gas so soon after Rex Tillerson stepped back from calling for regime change in Syria might not be a coincidence. In other words, Assad might have felt emboldened by the signal from the U.S. that he might remain in power long-term and decided to show off his newly secure status with some WMD. Why single out Tillerson for criticism, though? Rubio’s pal Nikki Haley said the same thing about Assad’s ouster no longer being top priority for the U.S. And they’re both carrying out a policy set (in theory) by Donald Trump, who somehow also escaped Rubio’s criticism. Tillerson, in fact, is arguably fourth on the diplomatic depth chart right now behind Trump, Haley, and jack-of-all-trades Jared Kushner. He’s an easy target for Rubio, but he’s not acting in a vacuum.

The topic of WMD in Iraq has been a hot potato for more than two decades, ever since the end of the first Gulf War and the procession of 17 UN Security Council resolutions demanding that Saddam Hussein verifiably destroy them. Hussein ignored those demands and committed numerous violations of the 1991 cease-fire agreement that suspended the war. In 2003, the US went back to war in part over the issue of WMD, deposing Hussein but coming up empty on the accusations of chemical and biological weapons, which prompted the “Bush lied” arguments that have echoed ever since. Occasionally, caches of chemical weapons have been found in Iraq, reviving the debate, but they have been weapons that had already been declared and transferred to UN control before the 2003 invasion.

The Central Intelligence Agency, working with American troops during the occupation of Iraq, repeatedly purchased nerve-agent rockets from a secretive Iraqi seller, part of a previously undisclosed effort to ensure that old chemical weapons remaining in Iraq did not fall into the hands of terrorists or militant groups, according to current and former American officials.

The extraordinary arms purchase plan, known as Operation Avarice, began in 2005 and continued into 2006, and the American military deemed it a nonproliferation success. It led to the United States’ acquiring and destroying at least 400 Borak rockets, one of the internationally condemned chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein’s Baathist government manufactured in the 1980s but that were not accounted for by United Nations inspections mandated after the 1991 Persian Gulf war. …

In confidential declarations in the 1990s to the United Nations, Iraq gave shifting production numbers, up to 18,500. It also claimed to have destroyed its remaining stock before international inspectors arrived after the Persian Gulf war. …

The handoffs varied in size, including one of more than 150 warheads. American ordnance disposal technicians promptly destroyed most of them by detonation, the officials said, but some were taken to Camp Slayer, by Baghdad’s airport, for further testing.

This is the first time that there has been any media reporting on finds specific to the disputed munitions that Hussein refused to acknowledge. It sounds as though there were a large quantity of Borak rockets eventually procured, too, not just a few leftovers that might have been innocently overlooked by the previous dictatorship in Iraq. C.J. Chivers and Eric Schmitt also report that these were not the kind of exhausted and expired chemical weapons that the UN had been storing, but still potent enough to alarm the US when they were discovered.

Why this was kept quiet was anyone’s guess, but the secret was tightly held. Perhaps the CIA and Pentagon wanted to keep it under wraps so that they could quietly buy as many of the weapons off the black market as they could, without tipping their hand to the insurgency. That might have been good strategy, but the Pentagon kept it so quiet that it never told veterans serving in Iraq or the VA physicians that treated them later about the possibility that they had contact with chemical weapons from any source. It seems unlikely that the insurgents didn’t get their hands on any of the Boraks — and it’s not entirely clear that the US got them all, either.

This should recast the WMD debate from the 2003 invasion, but it probably won’t. At least so far, there’s no indication that the US found the new chemical- and biological-weapons programs that their faulty intelligence showed Saddam Hussein restarting between the two wars, and that will overshadow even a large number of undeclared sarin-filled Boraks in any attempt to show that the issue of WMD intel was at least nuanced. On the other hand, we’ve waited almost a decade to find this out, so it’s impossible to say what else may have been discovered and not declared by the Pentagon and CIA during that period. It may be another decade before we can safely assume anything.

“In this situation, when there are weapons of mass destruction involved — or when there is evidence that weapons of mass destruction may be involved — that would have an impact on the calculus about the impact that this has on our national security,” Earnest said. “Ultimately, that is the criteria that the president will use as he evaluates the best course of action in this situation, that is the best interests of national security.”

“The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and in this case there’s some evidence for that, it’s certainly something that the president is very concerned about. And it does have significant implications for our national security,” Earnest said.

Does it? As atrocious as it was, what new information does the Damascus gas attack add to our Syria “calculus,” to borrow a word Earnest used today? We knew Assad had chemical weapons; we knew that he’s willing to kill as many people as he needs or wants to retain power and protect the Alawites; and we knew (or kinda knew) from previous suspicious incidents — as many as 35 by one count — that he’s willing to use gas. The Damascus attack shows that he’s willing to use it on a larger scale than before, but his motive for the escalation is unclear. Does it follow logically that because he feels he can attack Syrians with impunity that he’d also now feel he can attack Americans with impunity? I’m thinking … no. There are phony rhetorical “red lines” of the sort O bumbled into last year in a lame attempt to deter Assad, and then there are real Red Lines that come with, say, flying planes into American skyscraper. A man as dogged as Assad about hanging on in Syria has a very strong incentive to keep his gas stockpile far out of range of U.S. citizens. The jihadis he’s fighting have much less incentive, which brings us back around to the cosmic irony that a U.S. attack on Assad would probably raise the risk of chemical terrorism against Americans by weakening regime control over the arsenal.

The significance of the Damascus attack isn’t that it poses a special threat to U.S. security, it’s that it weakens the international taboo against using WMD. And since the U.S. is, as O said in his CNN interview this morning, “the indispensable nation,” that means we’ve got to lead the charge (whatever the charge in this case looks like) against Assad. When a major crime is committed, the global policeman springs into action. Provided, of course, that the United Nations says he can:

OBAMA: …There’s a reason why, when you listen to what’s happened around Egypt and Syria, that everybody asks what the U.S. is doing. It’s because the United States continues to be the one country that people expect can do more than just simply protect their borders.

But that does not mean that we have to get involved with everything immediately. We have to think through strategically what’s going to be in our long-term national interests, even as we work cooperatively internationally to do everything we can to put pressure on those who would kill innocent civilians…

And, you know, if the U.S. goes in and attacks another country without a U.N. mandate and without clear evidence that can be presented, then there are questions in terms of whether international law supports it, do we have the coalition to make it work, and, you know, those are considerations that we have to take into account.

The fact that he’s emphasizing UN approval as an obstacle shows you how reluctant he is even now to intervene. The UN’s not going to do anything about Syria; Russia will veto any nascent international coalition into oblivion. In fact, not only is the Security Council paralyzed, but the UN has ordered its chemical weapons team in Syria not to go to the Damascus suburb where the new attack occurred because it’s simply too dangerous for them. O’s stuck in a moronic cycle of his own making where he clearly doesn’t want to get involve in Syria but is compelled to respond to each new Assad provocation with ever finer gradations of heightened “concern.” That’s what Josh Earnest’s blather about a threat to U.S. national security is about. We used to be taking this WMD stuff very seriously, but now we’re taking it very, very seriously, even as the president’s telling CNN that we need to think hard about not violating international law in trying to stop gas massacres. Oh well. Expect a small but symbolic upgrade in the quality of weapons that Syria’s rebels will be getting sometime soon.

Mystery solved. America’s ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power was in Ireland on a personal trip when she missed an emergency meeting on the alleged chemical gas attack in Syria, U.N. sources tell Fox News.

A day earlier, State Department officials were mum when asked for information on Power’s whereabouts. She had come under fire for missing Wednesday’s urgent U.N. Security Council meeting, where delegations weighed how to respond to charges that the Assad regime had just committed the deadliest chemical weapons attack in the country’s two-year civil war.

As that news was breaking at CBS, Reuters was reporting that western intelligence has in fact determined that the Damascus attack was likely chemical in nature. A belated exit question for you: Why on earth is this being leaked to CBS? Is O trying to gauge public reaction to a strike before it happens? (WMD use is the only thing that softens the poll numbers against U.S. action in Syria.) Preparing a strike on Assad and then telling him it’s coming is the perfect ending to the Obama intervention saga. The “red line” chatter was a symbolic gesture, and now the “red line” attack is going to be mostly symbolic too.

According to an average of the three surveys in the PollingReport.com database that asked, 58 percent of adults said they would support military intervention if it were confirmed that the Assad regime had used chemical weapons either on antigovernment forces or on civilians. (It remains to be seen, of course, whether public support for military intervention will actually increase now that such a confirmation has come.)

***

U.S. officials said that the determination to send weapons had been made weeks ago and that the chemical weapons finding provided fresh justification to act.

As Syrian government ­forces, with the help of Hezbollah and Iranian militias, began to turn the war in Assad’s favor after rebel gains during the winter, Obama ordered officials in late April to begin planning what weaponry to send and how to deliver it…

Even after Thursday’s announcement, critics in Washington, rebel leaders and even some U.S. allies described the prospect of sending light arms and ammunition as disappointing. The rebels have asked for armor-piercing and anti-aircraft weapons as well as other heavy equipment.

***

The United States will supply Syrian rebels with weapons through a CIA-run program, FoxNews confirmed Saturday.

President Obama decided Thursday to supply rebel forces with small arms and ammunition, following confirmation that the regime of Syria President Bashar al-Assad’s has been using chemical weapons in the 2-year-long civil war in which at least 90,000 people have been killed.

This move is possibly not too late, but it is certainly too little if the goal is to defeat Assad. The battle for Aleppo, the center of rebel strength, appears to be upon us. If Aleppo falls to the combined forces of Assad and the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, many thousands of people will be killed and the uprising will, in all likelihood, come to an end. Civil unrest will continue, but the back of the rebellion will have been broken.

The rebels haven’t been doing well lately — they’ve been making headlines mainly for YouTube videos showing atrocities committed by some in their ranks, rather than for military victories — and small arms won’t alter the balance. Even if handguns and rifles are all that the rebels would need for victory, delivering such weapons isn’t simply a matter of driving trucks into Aleppo. It will take time to build a proper pipeline to “vetted” rebels, which is to say, rebels who promise not to one day kill Americans with these weapons. Anti-tank weapons may be of help, but at the moment these don’t appear to be forthcoming, and portable surface-to-air missiles will most definitely not be forthcoming.

That’s because we don’t actually know who we’ll be helping.

***

[T]here is little likelihood of a political settlement between the two sides, a settlement that would inevitably benefit American adversaries, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran. Due to the nature and magnitude of the support that Iran has leveraged in Syria—weapons as well as troops, its own in addition to Hezbollah’s and Iranian-backed Iraqi militias—Assad’s ruling clique in Damascus is effectively little more at this point than an Iranian vassal. A negotiated settlement then would be nothing but a recognition of Iranian sway over Syria, which would spell disaster for the United States and its allies in the region, especially those bordering Syria, like Turkey, Jordan, and Israel. However, the Syrian rebels will make an agreement all but impossible.

As Michael Doran explained, a deal between the opposition and the regime “is utterly fanciful.” Assad, Doran wrote, “will never negotiate himself out of a job. Even if he was inclined to do so—and he is not—a deal is a practical impossibility, due to the fractiousness of the opposition. Rebel leaders speak only for their own groups. An agreement by one leader would never be binding on the others. The war will go on no matter what.”

***

Last month, the Economist had an illuminating report on the Syrian opposition groups, which concluded that, “As the civil war has dragged on, the rebels, hardened by war and seeing where their bread is buttered, have become more Islamist and extreme.” An accompanying helpful chart breaks down the three main fronts of the opposition (which represent alliances of various rebel fighting groups) and then further breaks down the nine key rebel fighting groups. According to the chart, two of the three main fronts are Islamist, as are seven of the nine key rebel fighting groups…

It’s hard to believe that the same administration that brought us Benghazi would have such perfect information about which rebel groups in a bloody war-torn country are completely free of Islamist links, let alone have the logistical ability to ensure the weapons don’t end up in the hands of bad actors.

***

A key lesson of Afghanistan is to be very clear from the beginning about your objective and mission. In the 1980s the goal was to defeat the Soviets by creating a quagmire for the Red Army like Vietnam was for America. The key planners behind the CIA operation to support the mujahedin, especially CIA Director Bill Casey, wanted to turn Afghanistan into Moscow’s Vietnam. They did.

Then Washington let mission creep develop. The Reagan and Bush administrations were unsure of what they wanted to do next. Some in Washington wanted to overthrow the communist government in Kabul that survived after the Russian withdrawal. Others wanted to support a political process to build a broad-based national unity government. And others wanted to forget Afghanistan and concentrate on forging a new world order with the post-communist leadership in Moscow. The American national-security bureaucracy became almost dysfunctional. In the end chaos ensued in Afghanistan.

What mission does arming the rebels in Syria support? It must be more than stopping Assad’s use of chemical weapons. Is it regime change or bolstering a political process in Geneva? Is it a means to unite the opposition and purge it of the al Nusra front, al Qaeda’s arm in Syria? Is it to defeat Iran and Hezbollah and bring regime change beyond Syria? We have yet to hear the answers to these questions.

***

If Washington endorses the goal of bleeding Iran and its allies through proxy warfare, a whole range of more interventionist policies logically follow. The model here would presumably be the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan — a long-term insurgency coordinated through neighboring countries, fueled by Gulf money, and popularized by Islamist and sectarian propaganda.

“Success” in this strategy would be defined by the damage inflicted on Iran and its allies — and not by reducing the civilian body count, producing a more stable and peaceful Syria, or marginalizing the more extreme jihadists. Ending the war would not be a particular priority, unless it involved Assad’s total military defeat. The increased violence, refugee flows, and regionalization of conflict would likely increase the pressure on neighboring states such as Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, and Iraq. It would also likely increase sectarianism, as harping on Sunni-Shiite divisions is a key part of the Arab Gulf’s political effort to mobilize support for the Syrian opposition (and to intimidate local Shiite populations, naturally). And the war zone would continue to be fertile ground for al Qaeda’s jihad, no matter how many arms were sent to its “moderate” rivals in the opposition.

***

“In a sense, Obama owns Syria now,” says Joshua Landis, a highly regarded Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. “I presume he’ll try to go in toe by toe.… But he has to decide what his objectives are, which he hasn’t. Does he want to provide just enough arms to keep the status quo and divide Syria in two? Does he want to give them enough to take Damascus and drive the Alawites [President Bashar al-Assad’s ruling sect] into the mountains? Does he want he want to see them take over the entire country?”…

Earlier this year, the CIA concluded that arming the rebels with small-scale weapons—what is likely now being considered—could not tip the balance of the conflict. U.S. and Israeli officials still fear that delivering anything larger or more lethal, such as antitank or surface-to-air missiles, could be used on U.S., Israeli, or commercial targets if they fell into terrorist hands. Chris Dougherty, an expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says the “ideal” weapons to arm the Syrian opposition groups—such as man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS) that could counter the Syrian Air Force’s control of the skies, antitank guided munitions such as the FGM-148 Javelin, and GPS- or laser-guided mortar rounds—are also the weapons that “have the most potential for blowback.”

Behind the scenes, … Israeli and U.S. military officials are coordinating how to target and destroy Assad’s arsenal of unconventional weapons under assorted scenarios, Israeli military and intelligence officials tell TIME. One scenario would be the sudden removal of Assad from the scene, be it by flight, death or if he simply disappears. That would prompt the allies to launch operations on the estimated 18 depots and other sites where WMDs are stored, the officials said. Search and destroy operations would also be launched if the weapons appeared to be about to fall into the hands of the rebels, which include Islamist extremists aligned with al-Qaeda.

The Israeli officials emphasized that it had not been decided whether both Israeli and U.S. forces would act, or who would do what. But the U.S. plans called for deploying forces on the ground as well as waves of airstrikes, to assure that the chemical and biological components are neutralized, according to the Israeli officials.

***

“You can fully expect that the president will be heard on these issues repeatedly in coming days,” Rhodes said, previewing the gathering of international leaders.

“The American people need to hear directly from the president on this,” a GOP Senate aide told The Washington Examiner. “Why isn’t he the one outlining the White House’s response?”

***

“Militarily, where is our commander in chief? We’re talking now more new interventions. I say until we know what we’re doing, until we have a commander and chief who knows what he’s doing, well, let these radical Islamic countries who aren’t even respecting basic human rights, where both sides are slaughtering each other as they scream over an arbitrary red line, ‘Allah Akbar,’ I say until we have someone who knows what they’re doing, I say let Allah sort it out,” Palin said at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference.

***

“It all seems to me rather sporadic, chaotic, unstructured,” he charged. “I don’t see any real strategic guidance to what we’re doing. I see a lot of rhetoric, a lot of emotion, a lot of propaganda, in fact.”

Via Greg Hengler. Like former NYT chief Bill Keller, I can’t see any pitfalls ahead from the White House being at odds with the UN on WMD while it plans war against a Middle Eastern regime.

Further to Ed’s post this morning, here’s a crafty theory I saw floated somewhere on Twitter last night to possibly explain why the rebels, rather than Assad, are suddenly tossing chemical weapons at their enemies: What if an Assad ally, like Iran or Russia, gave it to them? The longer the war drags on, the greater the risk of western intervention; if, like Moscow or Tehran, you’re rooting for the regime, that intervention is an unhappy prospect. The only way to force the west to keep its distance might be by making the rebels so politically toxic that the White House simply can’t sell a partnership with them to the American public. You would think the fact that the rebel ranks are teeming with jihadists would be enough to ensure that, but no: The administration will find someone among the opposition with whom it can do business, or rather someone it can point to for purposes of domestic politics as someone with whom it might potentially do business. Phase two, then, if you’re pro-Assad/anti-intervention is to ratchet up the taboo another way — maybe by feeding a small amount of chemical weapons to some of the nuttier elements among the rebels and hope that they sabotage their western support by using them.

Lots of flaws in that theory, though. For starters, Assad and his allies wouldn’t need to hand the weapons over to the rebels. They would use them themselves in a staged attack against their own side to “prove” that it’s the regime that’s being targeted by WMD, not vice versa. (Which reminds me: Why exactly is Carney “highly skeptical” of the UN report? Does he think the witnesses they spoke to are lying, or is he endorsing some sort of false-flag theory in which Assad used WMD but tried to make it look like the rebels had?) For another thing, without absolute smoking-gun proof that the rebels are the guilty party here, realistically nothing’s going to deter the White House from blaming Assad. Not even a UN finding will steer them away. This is no longer about WMD deterrence, after all, it’s about Obama having to protect the credibility of his previous statements, from the dumb “red line” that he may or may not even have meant to draw to his own well-publicized statement in Jerusalem that he was “highly skeptical” that the rebels, rather than Assad, would use chemical weapons. The new UN claim pointing the finger the other way makes him look like a sucker, and Israel’s airstrikes on the regime over the weekend make Obama look weak and ambivalent about countermeasures by comparison. No wonder he’s doubling down by blaming Assad today.

A rebel spokesman, who spoke from a “liberated area” held by the opposition in Damascus, told NBC News there were huge explosions just before 2 a.m. Sunday local time (7 p.m. Saturday ET) in the Qaysoun mountains on the edge of Damascus…

“Secondary explosions continued for about four hours. They shook all of Damascus. There was still smoke in the air as the sun came up.”

From its Damascus media office, the Free Syrian Army listed 9 apparent targets, including the Syrian Revolutionary Guard, the 104th brigade headquarters, a weapons depot in Qasyoun and a military research center at Jamraya…

While the government tried to use the airstrikes to taint the rebels by linking them to Israel, Syria’s arch rival, the attacks still pose a dilemma for an Assad regime already battling a relentless rebellion at home. If it fails to respond, it looks weak and opens the door to such airstrikes becoming a common occurrence. But any military retaliation against Israel would risk dragging the Jewish state and its powerful army into a broader conflict.

A senior Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to disclose information about a secret military operation to the media, confirmed that Israel launched an airstrike in the Syrian capital early Sunday but did not give more precise details about the location. The target was Fateh-110 missiles, which have precision guidance systems with better aim than anything Hezbollah is known to have in its arsenal, the official told The Associated Press.

***

[W]ow, this is awkward for the Syrian opposition. The regime will seek to exploit the raids to tie the rebels to the Zionist entity, after spending two years painting them as an undifferentiated mass of “terrorist gangs.” (Syrian television is already testing out this line, according to Reuters: “The new Israeli attack is an attempt to raise the morale of the terrorist groups which have been reeling from strikes by our noble army.”)

The strikes also promise to hypercharge the debate over Syria in the United States. Advocates of intervention will ask: If Syrian air defenses are so tough, as U.S. officials have been saying, why was Israel able to breach them so easily? Of course, a no-fly zone is a much more difficult and risky endeavor than a one-off raid, but you can expect that important distinction to get blurred.

There’s also a message here for Iran, whose nuclear program Israel has vowed to destroy if the Iranians cross Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s red line.

***

Israeli experts said that Israel had no interest in getting involved in the Syrian conflict beyond looking after Israel’s own, immediate interests, and that the latest strikes appeared to have more to do with Israel’s cardinal standoff against Iran.

“This shouldn’t be seen as Israel intervening on behalf of the rebels or against Bashar,” said Jonathan Spyer, a senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. “This is an escalation in a conflict we know about, and that is the conflict between Israel and Iran, the long shadow war, as people call it. This is an incident in that war.”…

Professor Moshe Maoz of the Hebrew University said that Iran was now the crucial actor regarding how things might unfold.

With the ‘right to protect’ based foreign policy now lying in ruins, Syria really is turning into a problem from hell for the White House. Whether considered from a humanitarian or a strategic point of view, all the choices are getting worse while the problem is becoming more important and harder to avoid…

1. Assad’s forces seem to be on the rebound militarily and are taking back some territory recently seized by the rebels…

2. But just because Assad is fighting smart doesn’t mean he’s not being brutal. The regime has been resorting to horrific levels of violence: a mix of retaliation, ethnic cleansing (to create a more secure Alawite base in the coastal area) and a deliberate use of terror to cow opponents. Case in point, there were fresh reports of a massacre this weekend in the coastal city of Banias. The source of this particular report was a pro-rebel group and so its numbers and details must be taken with a grain of salt, but overall there’s little reason to doubt that this kind of stuff is going on.

3. The reason for Assad’s recent success appears to be effective foreign support, especially from Iran. The most glaring evidence for this came this morning, with reports that Israel had struck a warehouse in Damascus full of advanced Iranian missiles intended ultimately for Hezbollah. This isn’t just a nasty local civil war. This isn’t just a broader Sunni-Shiite rivalry which threatens to spill over into Lebanon and Iraq. This is an important proxy battle for influence in the whole region, and Tehran is intimately involved. At the moment, it is defying the United States, the Sunni Arabs and western Europe, and it is succeeding.

***

The reports grew more disturbing, if still fragmentary, by the weekend of Aug. 18 and 19. Denis McDonough, then the president’s principal deputy national security adviser and now the White House chief of staff, coordinated a series of urgent classified meetings in the West Wing. “It was a catalyzing event,” said one official involved.

The advisers reviewed an array of pre-emptive military options and quickly discounted them as impractical. The evidence was not strong enough to warrant a pre-emptive strike, they concluded, and military officers said the best they could do with airstrikes or commando operations would be to limit the use of chemical weapons already deployed.

Mr. Obama’s advisers also raised legal issues. “How can we attack another country unless it’s in self-defense and with no Security Council resolution?” another official said, referring to United Nations authorization. “If he drops sarin on his own people, what’s that got to do with us?”

***

The administration’s ultimatum now seems like cheap talk, and it illustrates the risks of carelessly drawing red lines and issuing highly public threats that won’t be enforced.

So far, at least, the Obama administration has put off both consequences and accountability and simply pushed for further investigation. Meanwhile, Mr. Assad has not blinked, and the president’s political opponents, like Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, argue that Iran and North Korea will draw the wrong lessons if the president lets Mr. Assad call his bluff…

In practice, red lines often create perverse incentives and encourage the enemy to continue aggression even as it avoids a red line. Declaring that the United States would act only if chemical weapons were used in Syria implied that we would tolerate other forms of violence. Indeed, Mr. Assad’s regime has killed over 80,000 of its own people, primarily using artillery and bullets, knowing that these forms of death are not covered by the specific public warning regarding chemical weapons…

I believe if you want to end the Syrian civil war and tilt Syria onto a democratic path, you need an international force to occupy the entire country, secure the borders, disarm all the militias and midwife a transition to democracy. It would be staggeringly costly and take a long time, with the outcome still not guaranteed. But without a homegrown Syrian leader who can be a healer, not a divider, for all its communities, my view is that anything short of an external force that rebuilds Syria from the bottom up will fail. Since there are no countries volunteering for that role (and I am certainly not nominating the U.S.), my guess is that the fighting in Syria will continue until the parties get exhausted…

Here’s the one alternative that won’t happen: one side will decisively defeat the other and usher in peace that way. That is a fantasy.

“Firstly, he never should have drawn the red line. Second of all, the red lines were a green light to Bassar al-Assad to do anything short of that,” McCain told Fox News’ Chris Wallace. ”Chemical weapons are terrible, but isn’t it pretty terrible when you launch scud missiles against your own people, when you massacre over 70,000 people, drive a million into refugee camps? Those seem to have been acceptable to this administration, and it’s deplorable.“

]]>https://hotair.com/archives/2013/05/05/quotes-of-the-day-1366/feed/343Obama on Syria: When I said chemical weapons were a “game-changer,” I meant we’d rethink our options or somethinghttps://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/30/obama-on-syria-when-i-said-chemical-weapons-were-a-game-changer-i-meant-wed-rethink-our-options-or-something/
https://hotair.com/archives/2013/04/30/obama-on-syria-when-i-said-chemical-weapons-were-a-game-changer-i-meant-wed-rethink-our-options-or-something/#commentsTue, 30 Apr 2013 17:21:44 +0000http://hotair.com/?p=258044“By 'game-changer' I mean that we would have to rethink the range of options that are available to us."

Via Mediaite, to follow up on Ed’s post, here’s The One at this morning’s presser taking seven minutes to remind the world that he’s trying hard not to enforce his “red line.” The big soundbite is his vague pseudo-warning near the end about rethinking the “range of options” available to him, but that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is him wondering aloud whether Assad’s really responsible for using chemical weapons lately — “we don’t know when they were used, how they were used. We don’t know who used them. We don’t have a chain of custody,” etc. He sounded a lot more skeptical about claims of Assad’s innocence a few weeks ago at that presser in Jerusalem. If isn’t Assad isn’t to blame for the recent gas attacks, then who? Hmmmm:

[R]eactions in the U.S. intelligence community have varied because of the possibility — however small — that the exposure was accidental or caused by rebel fighters or others outside the Syrian government’s control, officials said.

Releases of poison gas could have occurred when soldiers loyal to the regime, which has been trying to secure and consolidate its dozens of chemical weapons sites, moved part of its stockpile, a U.S. Defense official said. Another possibility is that disloyal Syrian weapons scientists supplied chemicals to rebel fighters…

“The Iraq WMD is looming over this, as it ought to be,” a senior congressional official said. “How can you be more confident in the assessment here? These are questions we are all asking.”

All of that was also true back when O first started blathering about “red lines,” yet only now that he’s being called on to back up his threats are these other possible culprits suddenly occurring to him. Iran’s begun openly mocking him for his hesitation, issuing its own “red line” today forbidding use of WMDs by either Assad or “the opposition.” Does Obama now agree that the rebels themselves might be responsible for one of the incidents involving chemical weapons? (Assad’s regime accuses them of it regularly, for what little that’s worth.) No one pressed him on that today. If he does come to that conclusion, does that also cross America’s “red line” or is it only the regime’s use that would trigger action? If the point of the red line is to enforce a taboo against WMD, any usage should warrant intervention, not just if it’s done by Assad. But in that case, the rebels would actually have an incentive to go chemical: If you want Assad’s stockpile off the table, start gassing people and wait for U.S. or Jordanian or Turkish troops to swoop in and grab Assad’s arsenal.

The other reason O’s hesitating is that stories about the rebels’ radicalism keep piling up, none starker than this one at the Times over the weekend:

Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.

Nowhere in rebel-controlled Syria is there a secular fighting force to speak of…

“My sense is that there are no seculars,” said Elizabeth O’Bagy, of the Institute for the Study of War, who has made numerous trips to Syria in recent months to interview rebel commanders.

Good luck navigating the politics of intervention with rhetoric like that floating around in newspapers. It would take a hawk of unusually blind commitment to want to start bombing Assad when Syria-watchers are warning openly that the rebels are a witches’ brew of jihadists and Islamists. Is there anyone like that in American politics? There is, my friends.

I’ll leave you with a question: Why would Iran necessarily treat O’s retreat from his Syrian “red line” as proof that he’ll also retreat from his “red line” on their nuclear program? Every commentator I’ve read on that subject seems to think Obama’s now duty-bound to attack Assad if only to show Tehran that his ultimatums mean something, never mind whether the attack’s likely to succeed, whether it’ll have unintended consequences, whether it’ll embolden Assad to use whatever WMD he has left, etc. (This is a problem of O’s own making, of course. If he had kept his mouth shut about “red lines” in Syria to begin with, he wouldn’t be in a jam now.) If I was an Iranian strategist with a passing knowledge of U.S. politics, I wouldn’t assume that one retreat foretells another. On the contrary, I’d conclude that the flak he’s taking for being weak on Syria will force him into a corner such that he can’t afford to show weakness again if/when Iran tests him. He can get away with wimpiness towards Assad because the public doesn’t perceive him as a threat to the U.S. and because they’re suspicious of another regime-changing intervention after Iraq and Libya. Iran and its nuclear potential are a different problem, one O’s been talking about since before he was elected to his first term. Does Iran understand that (their propaganda today about “red lines” notwithstanding), or do they really think that the response to Syria necessarily predicts the response to them?

Across Syria, rebel-held areas are dotted with Islamic courts staffed by lawyers and clerics, and by fighting brigades led by extremists. Even the Supreme Military Council, the umbrella rebel organization whose formation the West had hoped would sideline radical groups, is stocked with commanders who want to infuse Islamic law into a future Syrian government.

This is the landscape President Obama confronts as he considers how to respond to growing evidence that Syrian officials have used chemical weapons, crossing a red line he had set…

“My sense is that there are no seculars,” said Elizabeth O’Bagy, of the Institute for the Study of War who has made numerous trips to Syria in recent months to interview rebel commanders.

***

New questions have emerged over the source of the soil and other samples from Syria which, it is claimed, have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, amid apparent inconsistencies between eyewitness accounts describing one of the attacks and textbook descriptions of the weapon…

According the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, “sarin is a nerve agent that is one of the most toxic of the known chemical warfare agents. It is a clear colourless liquid … generally odourless and tasteless”.

But eyewitness accounts of that attack, in which six rebels died and which were reported at the time by the Associated Press described “white smoke” pouring from shells that “smell[ed] … like hydrochloric acid”.

***

As the Obama administration weighs how to respond to the use of poison gas, intelligence officials say they are confident that sophisticated tests of tissue and soil samples and other evidence point to sarin. But reactions in the U.S. intelligence community have varied because of the possibility — however small — that the exposure was accidental or caused by rebel fighters or others outside the Syrian government’s control, officials said.

Releases of poison gas could have occurred when soldiers loyal to the regime, which has been trying to secure and consolidate its dozens of chemical weapons sites, moved part of its stockpile, a U.S. Defense official said. Another possibility is that disloyal Syrian weapons scientists supplied chemicals to rebel fighters…

“The Iraq WMD is looming over this, as it ought to be,” a senior congressional official said. “How can you be more confident in the assessment here? These are questions we are all asking.”

U.S. military planners are developing detailed options for how the U.S. could take action once decisive evidence of Syrian chemical weapons use has been found. There are a range of targets, including facilities associated with the chemical weapons program, the command and control nodes of Assad’s army and special units that have been involved in the bloodiest fighting. But these would be major operations requiring a very heavy investment of money, troops and hardware, and the administration much prefers the alternative of a negotiated political settlement, if it can be achieved with Russian help.

***

One thing that Obama has made very clear in his approach to war and peace: He abhors the prospect of uncontrolled escalation. (In this sense, he bears similarities to John F. Kennedy.) And, as he no doubt knows well, Syria isn’t Libya, where an embattled, isolated dictator was hanging on to power only with the aid of foreign mercenaries. Assad has the Syrian army fighting for him (minus a few high-ranking defectors); he has the support of several factions of the Syrian population, including Christians, who fear what might happen if the Muslim rebels—some of them radical Islamists—take power; and he receives aid, to varying degrees, from Russia, China, and Iran. Toppling Assad might mark not the end but merely a new chapter of a bourgeoning civil war…

But any president who’s apprehensive about escalation—and any president who’s read the history of the Vietnam War, as Obama has—must be concerned that one step inexorably leads to another. What happens after the first step? What happens when the Syrians escalate in response? Who cleans up the mess after it’s over? How much will this venture, however well intentioned, cost in lives and dollars? Obama probably also knows that the senators urging him to take military action will shirk responsibility, and blame him for all the troubles, if Syria collapses or goes up in flames in the aftermath.

***

“Once you set up a military no-fly zone or safe zone, you’re on a slippery slope, mission creep and before you know it, you have boots on the ground,” said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA analyst and Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution.

“Or you end up like Libya where you don’t really have a control mechanism for the end-game, should you end up with chaos.”

The U.S. military has also completed planning for going into Syria and securing its chemical weapons under different scenarios, including one in which Assad falls from power and his forces disintegrate, leaving weapons sites vulnerable to pillaging…

Asked if he was confident the U.S. military could secure Syria’s chemical weapons stock, Dempsey told Congress: “Not as I sit here today simply because they have been moving it and the number of sites is quite numerous.”

***

With even ardent Obama supporters like Jeffrey Goldberg reminding the president he has made it crystal clear that chemical weapons use would be a red line that would trigger a strong U.S. response, what follows will not only tell us whether that promise would be kept. It will also illustrate just how seriously to take other pledges the administration has made, specifically its vow never to allow Iran to go nuclear. With the White House desperately trying to buy time before making a decision on Syria, it’s fair to ask why anyone should regard American rhetoric on Iran as anything more than an elaborate bluff if Obama won’t keep his word about Assad’s behavior…

There may be no good options in Syria, but the blowback from a realization that the U.S. won’t stop mass killings in this manner may be far more costly. The price may not be paid by Americans, at least not immediately, but the toll in blood and diplomatic and security complications will be great. If American “red lines” mean nothing, then Obama’s blind faith in diplomacy will be exposed as a disastrous sham.

***

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has huge stakes in the survival of Mr. Assad, his only real ally in the region. And United States intelligence analysts believe that Iran’s leaders have interpreted two decades of American drift on the North — during which Mr. Obama’s three immediate predecessors all said they would never tolerate the country’s obtaining nuclear arms — as a sign that Washington will not wage war to stop even a rogue nation from obtaining nuclear arms, or the ability to build them.

If the United States intervened in Syria to secure its chemical stockpiles — perhaps organizing the Arab League, the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council or NATO to share the job — Israeli officials say it would be a signal that Mr. Obama would most likely back up his warnings to Iran the same way. But the prospect of such a move also worries many in Jerusalem: one senior official said he feared that an intervention in Syria could also obfuscate “the problem of greater concern” for Israel, stopping Iran’s nuclear program.

***

But the White House must recognize that the game has already changed. U.S. credibility is on the line. For all the temptation to hide behind the decision to invade Iraq based on faulty intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, Obama must realize the tremendous damage he will do to the United States and to his legacy if he fails to act. He should understand the deep and lasting damage done when the gap between words and deeds becomes too great to ignore, when those who wield power are exposed as not saying what they mean or meaning what they say.

The distrust, cynicism and hatred with which the United States is regarded in much of the world, particularly among Muslims across the Middle East and North Africa, is already a cancer. Standing by while Assad gasses his people will guarantee that, whatever else Obama may achieve, he will be remembered as a president who proclaimed a new beginning with the Muslim world but presided over a deadly chapter in the same old story.

***

Claire McCaskill, a Democratic senator and member of the homeland-security and armed-services committees, stood out this Sunday morning by not rejecting the possibility of deploying U.S. troops to address Syria’s civil war. When host Bob Schieffer asked her and Republican senator Saxby Chambliss about the possibility or necessity of deploying U.S. troops at some point, McCaskill responded, “I don’t think you ever want to rule it out. As Saxby said, this thing has really deteriorated, and it’s not really at a tipping point, so I don’t think you ever want to say absolutely not. Obviously, we don’t want to do that unless it’s absolutely necessary.”…

The circumstances under which U.S. troops would be deployed aren’t clear — a U.N. peacekeeping operation, likely under Chapter VII of the U.N. charter, is not out of the question if Russia and China finally accept Assad’s fate, but U.S. troops do not particpate in such operations except as commanders (the U.S. contributes a huge share of their funding, though). A NATO on-the-ground peacekeeping or peace-making mission is theoretically possible, but was not carried out during the Libyan civil war, despite NATO’s extensive involvement — some allied special forces were put on the ground, but not Americans.

***

It’s a headache for a president whose main mission was to get America out of bad wars, not into new ones. But there’s likely no way around it — sooner or later, Obama will have to make good on enforcing his red line. Failure to do so will undermine his credibility, encourage the Assad regime to deploy additional chemical weapons, and send a powerful signal to America’s friends and adversaries that we don’t mean what we say…

But a red line has indeed been crossed — not only in terms of Syria’s use of chemical weapons, but also in the slippery slide toward American military involvement. What Obama needs to decide is whether such military action is designed to deter the use of chemical weapons or topple the Assad regime by giving the rebels the advantages they’ve long sought — weapons, a no-fly zone, or direct U.S. military strikes against regime targets.

Not just once, either. Repeatedly. That makes not one but two close U.S. allies whispering that Assad’s gone and done the thing that the leader of the free world said he Must Not Do.

It’s intervention time.

Israel’s senior military intelligence analyst said Tuesday there was evidence the Syrian government had repeatedly used chemical weapons in the last month, and he criticized the international community for failing to respond, intensifying pressure on the Obama administration to intervene.

“The regime has increasingly used chemical weapons,” said Brig. Gen. Itai Brun, research commander in the intelligence directorate of the Israeli Defense Forces, echoing assertions made by Britain and France. “The very fact that they have used chemical weapons without any appropriate reaction,” he added, “is a very worrying development, because it might signal that this is legitimate.”…

The Syrian attacks killed “a couple of dozens,” the military official said, in what Israel judged as “a test” by President Bashar al-Assad of the international community’s response. He said the government had deployed chemicals a handful of times since, but that details of those attacks were sketchier.

“Their fear of using it is much lower than before using it,” the official said. “If somebody would take any reaction, maybe it would deter them from using it again.”

Netanyahu allegedly told John Kerry he couldn’t confirm the claim (which is odd, if Israeli military personnel are talking publicly about it), but the IDF’s intelligence arm thinks the weapon of choice was sarin based in part on photos of the victims foaming at the mouth with shrunken pupils. How they can be confident about that, though, I’m not sure: This Times piece is a nice quick tour of the difficulties of confirming that chemical WMD were used if you don’t have access to the scene or the victims and there aren’t lots and lots of bodies to prove that something unusual occurred. British intelligence allegedly got hold of a soil sample from the site of one attack that was smuggled out of the country, but how do you trust the provenance? Could be the rebels cooked up the sample somehow to try to engineer western intervention, or maybe they overran one of Assad’s chemical facilities and scraped it off there. (On the other hand, check out this photo of dead animals, all apparently killed bloodlessly near the site of one attack.) It’s surreal that U.S. entry into the war may hinge on sarin attacks that have killed “dozens” when conventional warfare killed more than 500 Syrians in one Damascus suburb over the past week alone, but there you go. That’s the “red line” calculus at work, to maintain the WMD taboo for other bad actors.

Chuck Hagel dropped a big hint last week that the White House might be preparing for action. Here’s another little nudge from Kerry:

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday urged NATO to prepare for the possible use of chemical weapons by Syria and called for alliance members to boost their assistance to the Syrian opposition.

Attending his first meeting of the alliance’s governing body, the North Atlantic Council, as America’s top diplomat, Kerry said contingency plans should be put in place to guard against the threat of a chemical weapons strike. NATO ally Turkey borders Syria and would be most at-risk from such an attack. NATO has already deployed Patriot missile batteries in Turkey.

“Planning regarding Syria, such as what (NATO) has already done, is an appropriate undertaking for the alliance,” Kerry told NATO foreign ministers. “We should also carefully and collectively consider how NATO is prepared to respond to protect its members from a Syrian threat, including any potential chemical weapons threat.”

I’m interested in the gamesmanship here by having a top Israeli military intel official go public with this while Obama’s trying to decide what to do or whether to acknowledge that a chemical attack happened at all. Is that Netanyahu playing an angle, formally denying any knowledge himself while getting the IDF to twist O’s arm by announcing this publicly? Or is this being done in concert with the White House, with O encouraging the Israelis to release the info as a test of U.S. public opinion? If there’s a big Do Something outcry, then he may have to act; if not (and there won’t be), then he can keep looking the other way for awhile. The problem with that theory, though, is that it assumes the public won’t blame the White House later if O refuses to act now and then there’s a mass-casualty attack in Syria involving sarin or something similarly foul. Just yesterday, Hagel insisted that WMD use in Syria would be a “game changer” (Obama has used those words himself), but what kind of game is being played here?